debugger

This blogpost is an introduction to Intel’s Pin dynamic instrumentation framework. Pin and the pintools were brought to my attention by Mahmoud Hatem in his blogpost Tracing Memory access of an oracle process: Intel PinTools. The Pin framework provides an API that abstracts instruction-set specifics (on the CPU layer). Because this is a dynamic binary instrumentation tool, it requires no recompiling of source code. This means we can use it with programs like the Oracle database executable.
The Pin framework download comes with a set of pre-created tools called ‘Pintools’. Some of these tools are really useful for Oracle investigation and research.

(warning: this is a rather detailed technical post on the internal working of the Oracle database’s commit interactions between the committing foreground processes and the log writer)

After the Trivadis Performance days I was chatting to Jonathan Lewis. I presented my Profiling the log writer and database writer presentation, in which I state the foreground (user/server) process looks at the commit SCN in order to determine if its logbuffer contents are written to disk by the logwriter(s). Jonathan suggested looking deeper into this matter, because looking at the commit SCN might not the way it truly works.

Oracle DBAs who are so old that they remember the days before Oracle 11.2 probably remember the tuning efforts for latches. I can still recall the latch number for cache buffers chains from the top of my head: number 98. In the older days this was another number, 157.

I decided to look into latches on Oracle 12.1.0.2 instance on Oracle Linux 7. This might also be a good time to go through how you think they work for yourself, it might be different than you think or have been taught.